CeBIT opens with tips from Obama crew

FOG, Bill Gates and a big hack at ASIO swirled around the CeBIT tech show which opened today at Sydney's Darling Harbour.

Harper Reed

FOG, Bill Gates and a big hack at ASIO swirled around the CeBIT tech show which opened today at Sydney's Darling Harbour.

The rare pea soup fog clogged the roads and disrupted flights in and out of Sydney while news of Microsoft legend Bill Gates, who is in Australia but not attending CeBIT, and embarrassing details of the blueprints for ASIO’s new headquarters being cyber swiped dominated the headlines.

Amidst these distractions, CeBIT had to rely on opening speeches from NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and a quick video hello from Prime Minister Julia Gillard to get its engines going.

The pollies were followed at the CeBIT opening plenary by star speakers Harper Reed and Rayid Ghani, the chief technology officer and chief data scientist, respectively of the successful Obama for America 2012 re-election campaign.

While Mr O'Farrell looks electorally safe at the moment, the pair may have had some good advice for Ms Gillard, who is looking down the barrel of political destruction, based on current polling.

Mr Reed said the one of the main ingredients of a successful social media political campaign was getting the digital goodies to voters quickly.

"On the engineering side the people we really liked to have on the Obama campaign were people who could ship products, people who were interested in getting the product out the door," said Mr Reed.

"There were so many times when we would focus on whether it was the right way or the wrong way to do something. It didn’t matter whether it was right or wrong because we couldn’t wait to iterate to get it right and then launch on November 12 (election day)."

Listening via social media was also high on the digital techniques for getting re-elected list.

Mr Reed advised all leaders of large organisations to get busy with personal tweets, mainly to get brutally honest feedback in response.

"You can start listening to the problems about the business personally. I think there’s a lot of hiding behind the bureaucracy, instead of really listening.

"This was a huge aspect of what we did -- we really tried to listen."

CeBIT continues through to Thursday.